These days, just about everybody over a certain age complains that the 'younger folk' don't know much about the past. This is understandable, for a number of reasons. This is an era of rapid change. Also, the proliferation of accessible knowledge in the computer age causes massive Information Overload, leading to people filling their heads with junk they don't need and making it difficult to find the Important Stuff (rather like Elektra's handbag, trust me, you don't want to go there). Finally, of course, there are the problems of educational systems that have increasingly become politicised battlegrounds where wars are waged over culture and the importance of this, or that, point of view. You really can't blame the kids for being confused.

I wish to state for the record, however, that I think pretty much everybody, young and/or old, is guilty of forgetting the past. Or of remembering it the way they want to, and leaving out some of the operative bits. Usually the part we don't want to remember, but should.

It's a lot of fun to look through the clickbait on Youtube: 'These Images of the Past Will Stun You!' and such. One person wrote, 'I fell asleep waiting to be stunned.' Amen. A lot of old footage of cities in the past lead to comments like 'I wish I'd lived in the 40s,' followed by the snarky response, 'Yeah, you could have got drafted into World War II.' Views of the past range from rosy, 'Wasn't it romantic?' to superior, 'Aren't we glad we know better than that now?' From babies in cage balconies in New York City (it was a thing, allegedly the air was fresher outside) to photos of horses and weird hats, we enjoy laughing at it all. But do we really have a clue?

Philip K Dick wrote a thought-provoking novel in 1964 called The Penultimate Truth. The story's outrageous premise – that the world's population has been driven underground in the belief that a nuclear war is raging on the surface – is fueled by the idea of the Yance-man, a Fake News specialist who writes scripts for the AI that represents the US president. It's nicely paranoid. Dick's premise, though, started with the observation that most people didn't remember even the history they had lived through. In his story, television documentaries about the Second World War altered facts – and were believed, even by the former participants.

I read this novel in the 80s, and laughed. Then I moved back to the US, and saw it happen in real time. People who were there, and should have known better, didn't question questionable statements in documentaries. Films skew our vision of the past. Americans believe there were movie cameras around during the Pearl Harbor attack because they saw a heavily-censored version of the hair-raising non-documentary December 7th, which was partly filmed in a water tank. Our brains are easily fooled, particularly when we want them to be.

Why am I bringing this up, other than to fill up a page and because I realised you didn't want to hear about the dream I had last night? Because it's our job to interpret the past. It's our job as Researchers and as fiction writers. Also, it's our job as people who have lived through a certain amount of history, and who have library cards and aren't afraid to use them. It's our job to confront the past as honestly as we know how, and to place roadblocks in front of people who don't want to remember the inconvenient truths.

Yeah, I know: neither do we, most of the time. We bathe our own pasts in a rosy glow – at least, the parts we enjoyed. The parts we disliked take on the somber hue of horror stories. It's easy to lump all of the past that didn't involve ourselves into the 'uninteresting' pile. If we learn that people of a different era and place did something we wouldn't do ourselves, why, we dismiss them as a bunch of nincompoops and loonies. 'We're so much more enlightened now,' we bleat. Pah.

You know what this means, don't you? It means we are called upon to do Research. (That's why we're called Researchers.) We need to probe, ask questions, find answers, dig deep and 'unpack' those stories, as the postmoderns say. We also need to balance common sense and empathy in our approach to those aliens, our great-great grandparents. No, I don't know why Great-Great-Grandpa Black John joined the Confederate army. I can guess: it was either that or go hide in a cave, or run down to Mississippi and join the State of Jones. Or worse: cross the county line and join the Yankees. I'll never know why he did that, because the story didn't get passed down. All I have are some dates and C.S.A. on a tombstone. Maybe he was enthused about it: after all, he named Great-Grandpa Robert Lee. Maybe he hated the whole thing. What I can do is find out where that army went, and make some guesses about what happened to them all. I do not have the temerity to believe he'd have cared what his great-great-grandchildren thought, or that he would necessarily have made his choices for any reasons that made sense to me.

I feel, however, that I have a right to know about it. I have both the right and obligation to find out as much as I can. That's why God invented libraries. And I have the absolute right to pass judgement on what they did back then. If I think they were nincompoops, I will say so.

If you think that somebody a hundred years in the future won't call us all nincompoops for the events of this year, think again. The only way that won't happen? If we finally descend so far into nincompoopery that there isn't going to be a hundred years from now. In which case, God will definitely call us all nincompoops.

In the meantime: there are tools for understanding other humans who do not share our location in the space/time continuum. Learn to use them. This is our sacred trust. h2g2 forever.

And now, children, I'm going to go and read A Sin by Any Other Name by Robert W Lee IV. Yes, he's related to the general with the pet chicken. If the book's any good, expect a review. [It was.] Y'all go find out about some more people. Together, we might just make a difference.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

22.04.19 Front Page

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